Plugins for Eclipse, Chrome and so on will only bring you so far. The other way around, namely turning vim into a multipurpose IDE does not satisfy my needs. One needs to admit that some features (refactoring support in Eclipse for example) cannot be matched by the available vim plugins. I know there are other solutions, like eclim, but I am looking for something more universal (think of using vim bindings in your email client).
This is why I have been thinking about implementing a vim emulation layer recently, so that every program can profit from vim keybindings. Basically this would be implemented as some form of keygrabber that would translate vim specific commands into regular ones.
Does anyone know of related pre-existing projects one could use as a reference. A quick google search did not deliver any results for me.